Late last year the Ontario Superior Court of Justice issued judgement in a hard-fought dispute between residential neighbours. After an 11-day small claims court trial (!) the Court allowed one neighbour’s privacy breach claim and dismissed the other’s.
The Court allowed a claim against the defendants for directing surveillance cameras and motion-activated floodlights at the plaintiffs’ property as part of a deliberate campaign of harassment. It awarded each plaintiff $8,000, noting evidence of “significant stress and irritation.” The Court also awarded each plaintiff $500 on account of their exposure to “obstructive parking.”
The successful plaintiffs tended to the high road, at one point returning the defendants’ stray dog in an act of neighbourliness. They did, however, publicly post a document that detailed a Provincial Offences Act conviction of one of the defendants. (They said did so to give their prying-eyed neighbours “something to look at.”) The Court dismissed a counterclaim based on this publication, explaining:
Convictions and sentences imposed by courts of law are events which occur in public and are publicly-available information. The fact that some third party has posted such facts on the internet makes them all the more public. I am unable to accept the defence submission, unsupported by authority, that for Mr. Cecchin to find and post this information constitutes an actionable invasion of privacy. Such a conclusion would be inconsistent with the definition pronounced by Sharpe J.A. in Jones v. Tsige (2012), 2012 ONCA 32 (CanLII), 108 O.R. (3d) 241 (C.A.), at para. 70. The conviction and sentence cannot be viewed as Mr. Bradbury’s “private affairs or concerns”. Nor would a reasonable person regard the search for or publication of the outcome of legal proceedings as “highly offensive.”
In a similar vein, the Court dismissed a counter-claim that alleged the plaintiffs committed a privacy violation by writing a letter to other neighbours drawing their attention to the defendants’ non-compliance with municipal bylaws. It said that the claim was untenable as one that attacked, “an exercise of free speech, of local political action and participation in the municipal legal process.”
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